Confession:

I do not think I’m as cool or as smart as my bookcases make me appear to be.

I have not read the majority of the books on my floor/shelves. In fact, I am more likely NOT to read a book if I own it.

I started this newsletter/journal because I wanted to read and write more. I have done neither.

HOWEVER

I have decided to become a hermit and devote all my free time to reading and writing and making art.¹ Or become a vampire and live forever and be a night librarian.

I get distracted. When I start reading something interesting, as I am now, I begin to add the books the author references to my tbr list, or I look up a word and then link hop from topic to topic, forgetting what I was reading in the first place.

Jalal Toufic’s What Was I Thinking?

I truly have no idea how I stumble upon books like this, but I do.² Then now I obviously have to go out and read/buy everything that Heidegger ever wrote. And since Toufic quotes a Gertrude Stein essay, I need to find that. Which in turn reminds me that I have a few of her books on my shelves I still need to read.

And it’s books like this one that spur me to write. I need someone to discuss this. I’m not even a full two pages in and I want to grab someone by their shirt and scream “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???!!! LET US DEBATE THIS PLEASE!!!” and then spend the rest of the night talking about thinking and maybe make out.

It has endnotes like this one

If a thoughtful artist is to include thought in his work, he or she should, like the thinker, include mostly if not only thoughts that happen to be thought-provoking (for thought, alas, is not always itself thought-provoking) — and/or thought-initiating.

THIS IS AN END NOTE.

HOW AMAZING IS THIS???

(can you tell i’m excited?)

I am overwhelmed by this, so much so I needed to write about not feeling smart enough for my own books. I only read 3 - 4 pages and already I need to go back and reread.

I love this shit.

In another timeline I would have been an astrophysicist. In yet another timeline I would have been a philosophy major who worked at a coffee shop and lived in Toronto. I got the timeline where I’m a librarian with not enough time nor enough friends to geek out with me on books like this.³

Is thinking about thinking thought-provoking? Is talking about thinking about about thinking thought-provoking OR is it thought-inhibiting? Is writing about talking about thinking about thinking thought-provoking?

And now I’m in a Deleuze rabbit hole.

Can someone explain “speculative realism” to me please?

Again Toufic:

[…]I am on the verge of being submerged by a vertiginous and seemingly infinite extension of thought as well as by an excessive rapidity and proliferation of evanescent associations between these thoughts, with the consequence that I will not be able to catch up with, let alone accompany any of these thoughts and their associations, thus missing boundless riches.

I don’t think there was a more apt sentence to explain what I go through on a daily basis.